TREASURE KILLS (Legends of Tsalagee Book 1) by Phil Truman Page A

gentle, and devoted Artie Lancaster. But when the big bomb came, Jo Lynn couldn’t soft peddle it to Artie.
    “So how’s Galynn gettin’ along these days?” Artie swirled some gravy covered roast beef on his fork into the mashed potatoes on the plate, and shoved the bite into his mouth.
    Jo Lynn set down the sugar dispenser she was filling, and sighed. She’d been dreading this moment since first getting the word the night before. Jo Lynn picked up a counter towel and began wiping the area in front of Artie’s plate. There just wasn’t anything she could do but come right out and say it.
    “Artie, honey,” she started.
    Artie held his fork midway between his mouth and plate. He looked at Jo Lynn with trepidation. He saw tears filling her eyes as she looked back at him.
    “Artie, Galynn has gone and got married.”
    “She did?” Artie asked in disbelief; hoping this was some kind of cruel joke on Jo Lynn’s part, even though her expression and eyes told him it most assuredly wasn’t.
    “Yes, hon, she did. She called last night. Said they went out to Vegas and just decided to get married while they were there. And I guess that’s what they did.”
    “Well,” Artie said, nodding. “Well,” he said again.
    “Oh, Artie, sugar, I’m so sorry,” Jo Lynn said, her eyes overflowing. She used the counter towel in her hands to dab her face and eyes. “I’m so mad at her I could spit,” she said, her voice both angry and weepy.
    Artie nodded some more, but didn’t say anything for a while. Finally he got up off his counter stool, fished out a ten and put it on the counter. “Okay, then,” he said. “Well.” He began putting on his jacket. “I’ll see you later.”
    That was the early spring of ’99. In July of ’01 Artie’s dad died. Artie stayed at his home place running the welding business, but not much else. On October 1, 2001 he asked his Uncle Buck to rent out the place if he could, and he joined the Army. Artie told the recruiter he wanted to go to Ranger School.
    In May of 2003, Artie stood in the gun turret atop a humvee, his thumbs on the butterfly trigger of the fifty-caliber machinegun. He was covering his platoon leader, Lieutenant John Eisenberg, and his buddy Specialist Fourth Class Butch Ouderkirk. His humvee, the lead vehicle in a three-vehicle convoy headed down the road to Ramadi, had stopped to help a pregnant woman. She had flagged them down, as she stood by a car on the side of the road. Lt. Eisenberg had ordered Ouderkirk to stop the humvee some thirty meters from the woman and her car. The two soldiers then exited the vehicle to go see how they could help her.
    When the car exploded, it knocked Artie back into the rim of the turret breaking the right transverse process bone on his second lumbar vertebra, and the spinous process on his third lumbar vertebra. It also bloodied his ears, and shot a piece of jagged steel into his left shoulder. His lieutenant, his buddy Ouderkirk, and the pregnant woman were blown to bits.
    The blow to his lower back bruised Artie’s spinal cord so that he was unable to stand or walk, but after a couple months of recuperation and physical rehab in Germany, he regained most of the function and mobility in his lower body.
    Artie’s wounds proved significant enough to get him a medical discharge and a monthly disability check. He returned home to Tsalagee in January of 2004; cleaned the dust and cobwebs out of his old home place, settled in with no particular plan in mind, and took up drinking as his main occupation.
    A couple of weeks after Artie moved back, his Uncle Buck came over to see if Artie needed anything. When Buck saw the disarray inside and outside the house, and the growing collection of beer cans, he told Artie that he sure could use a hand over at his place. Buck thought maybe an honest, hard day’s work would deter his nephew from a determined, hard day’s drinking.
    The work on Buck’s farm did slow down Artie’s drinking, but